Bundeskartellamt clears sale of E.ON subsidiary Thüga to municipal utility consortium

Yesterday the Bundeskartellamt cleared plans by several municipal utilities to acquire all the shares in Thüga Aktiengesellschaft from the E.ON group via their holding Integra Energie GmbH & Co. KGaA which was set up especially for this purpose. Consolidated in Thüga, which is located in Munich and has an annual turnover of approx. € 860 million, are mainly minority interests in approx. 90 municipal utilities and regional providers. In addition, Thüga provides energy services and in some parts of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria also directly supplies households with energy and drinking water. With their supply of gas and electricity alone, Thüga and its affiliates and associates have so far served around 2.9 to 3.5 million customers in Germany.

To date Thüga has been controlled by Germany's largest grid gas company, E.ON Ruhrgas. In the Bundeskartellamt’s view this link between the dominant upstream gas supplier E.ON and the re-distributor customers combined in Thüga for a long time contributed to the foreclosure, above all of the gas markets, to alternative domestic and foreign gas suppliers. The announcement of the voluntary divestment of Thüga from the E.ON group was therefore welcomed by the Bundeskartellamt as highly conducive to creating competitive structures in the energy sector (cf. Bundeskartellamt press release of 12 November 2008).
The shareholders of the acquiring consortium, Integra, are all holdings of Thüga itself, namely N-ERGIE in Nuremberg, Mainova in Frankfurt am Main, Hannover municipal utility (Stadtwerke Hannover) and 47 other local providers involved in the Freiburg consortium Kom9.

The concentration does not create or strengthen dominant positions in any of the gas and electricity markets concerned. On the contrary, the project reduces the extent of vertical integration of the E.ON group. Against this background it can be assumed that the concentration will have a positive effect on the markets concerned.

The Bundeskartellamt will continue to closely monitor the advancing remunicipalisation process in the German energy sector in order to identify in good time any competition problems which might arise.

An official version of the decision will be published shortly on the Bundeskartellamt's website.